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ABSTRACT
This article looks at how the National Football League (NFL) uses television and new media technologies to engage in a pedagogical project of teaching the game and its culture to children so that they can produce themselves as fans valuable to the NFL. The NFL takes these steps because becoming a fan of any sport is not a passive process; it requires significant, focused labor to learn the requisite knowledge and perform an identity tied to the consumption of specific cultural commodities. We specifically look at the television show NFL Rush Zone, produced in partnership with Nickelodeon, and the website nflrush.com that together form an inter-textual pedagogical and performative narrative space where children can learn to be football fans and simultaneously perform a fan identity. Since fans are central to the NFL’s $9.5 billion annual revenues, we argue that this process of subjectification is also a process of commodification.
Notes
1 When coding by video game genre (i.e., types of gameplay interaction) we found the following percentages for the 83 games we examined: casual games (31%), shooters (22%), sports-themed (18%), puzzles (16%), action (5%), mazes (4%), strategy (2%), and trivia (2%).
2 When coding by the types of knowledge present in the games we arrived at following percentages: technical knowledge (42%), cultural knowledge (25%), miscellaneous (i.e., nonfootball related) knowledge (33%), and the total percentage for games containing technical or cultural football knowledge (67%). Of the 83 games coded 36% have imagery or thematic tie-ins that link them to the NRZ cartoon—of the 33% falling under the miscellaneous category, 55% of these games have imagery or thematic tie-ins to the cartoon.